IBM open to aligning with Indian IT companies for Watson platform

NEW DELHI: IBM, in line with its massive bet on the latest cognitive computing platform Watson, says it is open to striking partnerships with Indian IT companies, even though most of them compete with the American technology giant in many markets. In an interview with ET, IBM’s India chief, Vanitha Narayanan, said the company is also looking at roping in the huge developer community as well as startups in the country to build products using Watson. IBM’s most ambitious bet in this space, Watson has so far won one client in India and is in very advanced talks with several companies, said Narayanan.

Earlier this month, IBM signed a deal with Manipal Hospitals in its first deployment of the technology in India. Narayanan said the company is talking to many clients in India, both in the healthcare as well as non-healthcare space, to adopt the technology. “I feel we are on day one of the cognitive journey which is going to take several decades,” Narayanan said, adding that the company is not very aggressively pushing for the adoption of Watson among its customers since it wants to make sure that the system has enough learning to work in a particular sector.

Almost 80% of the data which is being produced in the country remains untouched and Watson aims to process that and turn it into useful information. India’s software services companies too are placing big bets on data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics. Narayanan said Indian IT companies are already partners of IBM for its cloud services platform Bluemix and that the company will be open to collaborating with them even for the Watson platform. “Every Watson API (application program interface) is available to everyone. In that sense, we are not saying that we are going to sell only to our top customers,” she said.